First Hit: A very well acted film that doesn’t spin a Hollywood ending but lacks character development.
The main actors, Don Cheadle, Ethan Hawke, Richard Gere, Wesley Snipes, and Ellen Barkin are all strong characters in this film.
This is a three story film focused around Gere, Cheadle and Hawke. Gere plays Eddie a cop who has just a week to go until he retires. He’s an alcoholic, divorced, lonely, doesn’t want to live nor does he care much about his fellow officers.
Cheadle is an undercover cop named Tango who is embedded into the Brooklyn drug scene. He did time in the same prison as Caz (Snipes) to build a trusting friendship and now works at the highest level of Caz’s drug business.
He's also being pressured by Agent Smith (Barkin). Hawke plays Sal a plain clothes drug cop who has 4 kids with twins on the way. His wife is ill from the mold in their cramped house and so he’s under self imposed pressure to get a hold of some cash to buy a new home.
Barkin plays Agent Smith a very hard nose woman demanding that Caz take a huge risk for her. Snipes plays Caz, a Brooklyn drug lord just out of prison and back in the neighborhood. He finds the drug trade risky and wonders about how to get out of the business with his paper (money). The three stories are; Eddie retiring alive, Hawke finding a way to divert drug money into his pocket for a new home, and Cheadle doing what he needs to do so that he can get a promotion, have a desk job and get his life back to something he understands.
The way the film begins there is a lot of suspense and identification of each person in their present situations, but what was missing was how each person got to their particular state of mind.
The film’s ending brings all three unrelated stories to a close in one location.
Cheadle was by far and away the most powerful force in the film. He was riveting. Snipes was very strong and I was happy to see him in a role where he wasn’t some super warrior. Gere was rather low key but effective as a cop who was just done with being a cop and was counting down the days. Hawke was good, but his character seemed a bit more scattered than made sense. Barkin, in what amounted to a two scene role, was very strong.
Overall: The film was entertaining. Because it bounced between three stories there never was an out breath to take it all in. I would have like less intense action and a little more character development, like how did Gere become so jaded?